Sustainable Coastal Area Resilience Planning

This study seeks to develop a location independent scalable framework for Community based Sustainable Coastal Area Resilience Planning (C-SCARP).

The data-driven framework is adaptable to other locations and/or scales in the future. The proposed C-SCARP framework will make use of an adapted and expanded version of the GoldSET suite of decision support tools that incorporates multi-criteria analysis in a sustainability evaluation framework. Three distinct uses of GoldSET are anticipated:

Resilience Baseline Mapping: They will be used to evaluate the current state of resilience.

Resilience Forecasting: They will be used to incorporate and evaluate the results of forecasting models researched and produced in this project.

Resilience Scenario Planning: Based on the current and future resilience mapping exercises, the spatial expression of and benchmarking of the effectiveness of mitigation measures will be simulated.

Key inputs into the C-SCARP framework will come from existing models developed by NOAA and its partners and include elevated water levels from long-term sea level rise, tides and storm surge, combined with changes in the frequency and intensity of storms, all of which increase the risk of devastating impacts and pose threats to natural/human coastal systems.

To effectively demonstrate the applicability and scalability of the proposed approach, a number of “Use Cases” will be conducted for communities with different scales and attributes in Coastal Georgia. A community is considered herein as a complex dynamic system that has inter-dependencies between the infrastructure systems and includes diverse elements such as the “transportation”, “electrical”, “communications”, “social” and “economic” systems. In many cases, the impacted community (i.e. the area directly impacted) is not the same as the influenced community (i.e. the area affected). The “Use Cases” will allow for a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed framework and tools and provide insight into a range of critical factors including: how overlapping governmental entities can complement each other; how the core of logistics centered operations can influence a geographically distributed industry; and how “resilience equity” can be a critical component of public/private funding and investment decisions.